A Quote by Willem de Kooning

I think I'm painting a picture of two women but it may turn out to be a landscape. — © Willem de Kooning
I think I'm painting a picture of two women but it may turn out to be a landscape.
When I'm painting the picture, I'm really painting a picture. I may have a flat-footed technique, or something like that, but still, to me, the thrill, or the meat of the thing, is the actual painting. I don't get any thrill out of laying it out.
Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments?
Before a painter puts a brush to his canvas, he sees his picture mentally.... If you think of yourself in terms of a painting, what do you see?... Is the picture one you think worth painting?... You create yourself in the image you hold in your mind.
When you are painting a landscape, assume the painting is real and the landscape is an illusion.
A landscape painting in which composition is ignored is like a line taken from a poem at random: it lacks context, and may or may not make sense.
In the landscape, colors are more neutral than you may think. Pay close attention to this. Small areas of rich color can make the whole painting look colorful.
You have bits of canvas that are unpainted and you have these thick stretcher bars. So you see that a painting is an object; that it's not a window into something - you're not looking at a landscape, you're not looking at a portrait, but you're looking at a painting. It's basically: A painting is a painting is a painting. And it's what Frank Stella said famously: What you see is what you see.
I think I 'turn off' women. I've a kind of a weird personality. Women may think that I'm a mess.
What do you think of this" he asked, indicating the painting nearby. She gave him an odd look. "I think it's an enormous painting of a dog." He made a show of considering the picture and nodded seriously. "An astute observation.
We struggle against easel painting not because it is an aesthetic form of painting, but because it is not modern, for it does not succeed in bringing out the technical side, it is a redundant, exclusive art, and cannot be of any use to the masses. Hence we are struggling not against painting but against photography carried out as if it were an etching, a drawing, a picture in sepia or watercolor.
I may discuss love, and I don't mind if two men fall in love, fine. Two women, fine. But I flinch when I think of two Jewish women getting together and having a child because the idea of having two Jewish mothers makes my head explode. I have one; I couldn't handle two.
If women have become innocent victims, if women running around today are unable to protect themselves, if the picture that we're painting, if the caricature we are creating is of women that are helpless waifs who are at risk of predator men throughout the busy day, then we have to somehow involve Hillary Clinton in that recipe in truthful and honest ways. That, when it came to defending and protecting women who alleged that they had been abused or even raped by her husband, those women were nothing but scum who had to be dispatched and just swept out of the way.
One ends up with a landscape one has never seen before but it is presumably the landscape you were feeling as you started the painting.
The vivacity and brightness of colors in a landscape will never bear any comparison with a landscape in nature when it is illumined by the sun, unless the painting is placed in such a position that it will receive the same light from the sun as does the landscape.
Maybe the given person, cup, or landscape is lost before one gets to painting. A figure exerts a continuing and unspecified influence on a painting as the canvas develops. The represented forms are loaded with psychological feeling. It can't ever just be painting.
Realist painting has to do with leaving out a lot of detail. I think my painting can be a little shocking in all that it leaves out. But what happens is that the mind fills in what's missing . . . Painting is a way of making you see what I saw.
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